Dance Umbrella is Britain's most important forum for contemporary dance - but
it needs to find its own Strictly factor says Sarah Crompton.

Last Saturday night, while more than 11 million people were tuning into Strictly Come Dancing, I was sitting in a wonderful new arts centre around the back of King’s Cross in London, pondering the state of contemporary dance. Then I came home, watched Strictly on the iPad, and pondered some more.

Dance Umbrella has been a force for extreme good in contemporary dance in the 34 years of its existence, introducing to Britain many foreign companies that had never been seen here and nurturing native talents such as Michael Clark, Jonathan Burrows and Russell Maliphant. It was under its wing that Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown, Pina Bausch and William Forsythe made their mark in this country and every important trend has been reflected in its programming.

But times change. Dance Umbrella, having created an appetite for modern dance, then found other theatres such as Sadler’s Wells and the Barbican offering stages to its stars. It lost purpose and shape and – in a blow from the Arts Council – last year also lost nearly 45 per cent of its funding.

It therefore makes sense that it has now coalesced its activities on the glossy new campus of the Central St Martins College of Arts and Design, a newly combined creative arts university. This compact and well-appointed location allows a small group of dance lovers to gather and examine the state of their art.

On Saturday night this involved watching a new film created by Siobhan Davies and David Hinton, called All This Can Happen, which set the words of Robert Walser’s The Walk against a carefully selected sequence of archive images; some elegiacally beautiful, some slightly over-obvious. Jonathan Burrows has been co-curator of the entire season and on Saturday he performed, with Matteo Fargion, Cheap Lecture and The Cow Piece, two contrasting works in which speech becomes movement in unexpected ways. The Dutch duo Jolika Sudermann and Alma Söderberg pursued a related thought in A Talk, in which the rhythms of a conversation, its evasions and repetitions, became a sort of repetitive dance. Haunted by the Future, which concluded the evening, the piece the influential British dance innovator Nigel Charnock was working on before his death this year, was a characteristically visceral study of a relationship, wonderfully performed by Talia Paz and Mike Winter.

It was a stimulating evening and I found something to enjoy in every piece; but with the exception of the Charnock, none of the works had any content that most people would recognise as dance. There was a lot of philosophising about dance, but hardly any movement, let alone actual steps.

Even as I sat there, I found myself wondering what anyone who wasn’t a student of dance would find actively to enjoy in these pieces. The Burrows and Fargion made me smile, but its cleverness didn’t make my spirits soar.

Much of the thinking surrounding contemporary dance of this kind would suggest that wanting dance to provoke an emotional response is a shallow attitude to the art form. I not only want it, but think it is the key to interesting more people in dance in general.

Which brings me to Strictly, a show at the opposite end of the scale. After all my thinking about the purpose of dance, I watched Fern Britton and Lisa Riley take to the ballroom floor. Neither look like dancers, but both can really move – and if you look at the expression of joy on their faces, you know that at least part of the purpose of dance is to excite and delight.

Now, I am not for a moment suggesting that Dance Umbrella should take the glitterball route and aim for mass popularity. There is a place for challenging choreography, for innovation and for analysis. But in reshaping its purpose, it can’t retreat into the kind of theoretical formalism that dominated the dance scene in the late Seventies. If it is to survive, it needs more than good new premises – it needs to find its own Strictly factor. And that, dare I say it, might just include a little bit of beauty and joy.